Another day, another 5pm Downing Street press conference, and this time it fell to Dominic Raab to confirm the worst. Not the very worst.
The very worst is that Dominic Raab is still acting prime minister, but given that Dominic Raab is Dominic Raab, he has little choice but to confirm the very worst everywhere he goes.
The worst, on this occasion, is that lockdown will go on for at least another three weeks. He stopped short of spelling out the full terrible scale of what it means, but he knows that we all know. It means at least another three weeks of 5pm Downing Street press conferences, many of them taken by Dominic Raab.
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He knew it, as well. You could tell by the steely glint in his eye. Either that or he’d just murdered someone for singing the wrong Phil Collins lyrics. With Dominic Raab you can never know.
Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance were there too, the full power trio of the five o’clock show. Sir Patrick had the usual death and infection graphs to show. We can’t end the lockdown now, or we’d undo all the good work we’ve done so far.
I’m sure he’s right. What do I know, about R1 and R1.5 and R0.9 and slowing the spread and flattening the curve and so on?
I do know, as it happens, that I was meant to be going to Mallorca this weekend. And I also know that, on 3 March, I was asked by my prospective travel companions whether I thought it would be going ahead, and I sent a one word reply: “Yes.”
I’d just been watching the 5pm Downing Street press conference you see, and I’d just heard Sir Patrick Vallance be asked about whether Brits should cancel their holiday plans, and he replied with the following: “Once the epidemic is everywhere then at that point restricting travel makes no difference at all.
“And if it grows in the UK it doesn’t really make sense to say you are more at risk somewhere else than you are here.”
They’re doing their best in impossible circumstances of course. It’s just that, well, some of the things that have been said in these 5pm press conferences haven’t necessarily aged all that well.
Past performance is not a guide to future returns, but when Dominic Raab or the CMO or the CSA or whoever else tells you what’s going to happen in three weeks or six weeks or even longer – when they intimate there could be a second wave, a second lockdown, longer and even more economically damaging than the first one – it is no disrespect to anybody involved to merely point at the accumulated evidence and suggest that neither they, nor anyone, would appear to have a clue what’s going to happen.
The things that have already happened, on the other hand, are easier to discuss. On Thursday afternoon, a former director of the WHO quietly pointed out that, on current numbers, and when factoring in conservative estimates on deaths for those who have never been tested for Covid-19, a reasonable guess at UK death toll, just for the early part of the pandemic, will be 40,000.
In South Korea, it is more likely to be 250, and that country has managed to keep its shops and restaurants open.
Raab was asked about these comments, but he wasn’t aware of them. There is only one thing Raab and the rest of us can know for certain. That the 5pm press conferences will keep on coming, for as long it takes, which is already a lot longer than has been required to work out that almost nothing that’s said in them turns out to have made any sense at all.
